My Programming Weblog

Enable Right-click & Middle-click with Fedora Core 6

The title should have been “How to enable right-click and middle click of PowerBook G4’s one-button-mouse in Fedora Core 6″. Since I’m not very keen in selecting a good title, I hope the one I wrote above made sense.

My Apple PowerBook G4 comes with just one button mouse. It’s not a problem when using it in OS X because I can simply emulate the right click by holding “fn” key while clicking. Recently, I just installed Fedora Core 6 as dual boot on this laptop; and one button mouse really gave me a big headache. I’ve beent trying to look for a good solution to fix this, but I didn’t get much luck. There were a few links on some blogs reporting that they had successfully solving this mouse problem by using something called “synaptic” driver, but that didn’t work for me either. The temporary solution was to use the USB mouse.

Today, I was very fortunate to have found this link that explained how to emulate the right-click as well as the middle-click. Here is a summary on how to do it:

As a root, open up /etc/sysctrl.conf

Add dev/mac_hid/mouse_button_emulation=1

Save it and reboot the PowerBook

That’s all, now you can right click by pressing fn+Alt on the keyboard, and fn+Apple key will give you a middle-click.

Thanks to the author on that website, I no longer need to bring the USB mouse with me anymore.